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Festival / Education

NIME Keynote: Andi Otto & Kristina Andersen – Unarchiving The Hands

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Simultaneously with Gaudeamus Festival 2024, our co-organized conference NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) takes place, in which instrument inventors and music technology developers give presentations for a week. You are also welcome to attend several concerts and keynotes of NIME with a passe-partout or Gaudeamus day ticket.

40 years ago, Michel Waisvisz played his first concert with The Hands. The instrument failed spectacularly, and was nearly abandoned, but after a chance encounter at IRCAM in Paris, it was rescued back out of the cardboard box and developed into one of the first sensor-driven musical instruments with a digital environment. The Hands made use of the then brand-new MIDI protocol and paved the path to the development of the STEIM SensorLab, which in turn inspired many early NIME projects.

In this talk, Andi Otto and Kristina Andersen will tell the story of The Hands and the significant traces it has left in the history of new musical interfaces. They will address the complexities of unarchiving a lifetime of musical live practice, which put documentation almost totally in the blind spot. Through this, they will loop back to the original STEIM stance of looking at the instrument as an expression of the desire to make new music and by extension the need for new instruments with which to imagine new music.

NIME 2024 is organized by the three partners HKU Music & Technology, Sounds Like Touch and
Gaudeamus and (financially) supported by TivoliVredenburg, Creative Industries Fund NL, City of
Utrecht and Utrecht Marketing.

Makers

Partners

NIME, HKU Music & Technology, Sounds Like Touch